In my studio practice I engage with diverse artistic disciplines and inquire into their common elements and contradictions. In my “Color Theory Series” I’ve entered a dialogue with two modernist painters, Howard Hodgkin, the British abstractionist, and Stuart Davis, the American cubist. Both attracted and repelled by their color sense, I select individual paintings as models from which to create my own works in which I study, challenge, and learn from their methods of color and composition. Instead of brush and paint, I substitute a collage technique, creating paintings of colored sign-vinyl on aluminum panel that are restricted to the hues available within the limited range of the commercial palette. I impose further constraints by imposing new parameters in respect to proportion, pattern, and orientation. My interventions set in play new opportunities for experimentation and risk as I seek compositional integrity on my own terms.
In addition to making and exhibiting a variety of forms of art myself, I explore my curiosity about art-thinking and problem-solving through many formal and informal relationships. In the roles of art critic and independent curator I am always growing a community of other artists whose work I publicize and who I encourage to continue to grow through the risks and pleasures of artmaking. Contact with the developing ideas and visions of my fellow artists and conveying an understanding and enthusiasm for their art to new audiences offer further ways of feeding and expanding my own ideas and motivations in art-making.
